There’s a new war on Australian streets, and it’s not just about tobacco or vapes; it’s about control, cash and crime. While Australia once led the world in cutting smoking rates, the rise of illicit vapes and tobacco-related violence shows that what worked yesterday may now be making things worse.

Current tobacco and vape controls have created a highly profitable illicit market in which organised crime violently competes for market share. If we are serious about reducing harm and keeping communities safe, it’s time to rethink our approach. Law enforcement alone cannot solve a public health problem we’ve evolved into a major criminal threat.

Over the past two decades, Australia's anti-smoking policies have been nothing short of revolutionary. High excise taxes, plain packaging and public education caused smoking rates to plummet in the 24 years since 1991 from over 24 percent of people aged at least 14 to under 11 percent. But this textbook case of coordinated, evidence-based policymaking has bred dangerous complacency and the assumption that yesterday’s policies can be linearly extended into the future.

They can’t. Anti-smoking policies have hit the law of diminishing returns. Remaining smokers are disproportionately drawn from the most marginalised and hardest-to-influence demographics: those facing homelessness, severe mental illness or intergenerational trauma. Regardless of pressure, they keep smoking, and if they cannot afford legal supply they will buy cheap under-the-counter cigarettes or tobacco pouches.

A new consumer nicotine market has also now emerged: vapes. Introduced as a supposedly harm-reduction alternative to smoking, vapes quickly began appealing to non-smokers, especially young people. With colourful packaging, candy-like flavours and disposability, they brought a raft of regulatory, enforcement and public health challenges. And unlike the tobacco giants of old, today's supply chains are run by fragmented, dynamic and increasingly violent criminal networks.

Vapes straddle an awkward line between consumer products and controlled substances. Due to the explosive growth of vape use after their introduction, the Australian government last year prohibited the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertisement of disposable single-use and non-therapeutic vapes.

In May 2025, the federal health minister, Mark Butler, proclaimed that the 2 percent drop in usage across the state showed that the ban on non-therapeutic sale was working. This is overly simplistic and premature. It is a marginal decline, and it is likely a blip. Furthermore, it does not reflect troubling qualitative shifts in vape products: yes they are more expensive, they can also now be much stronger and therefore less disposable, increasing the risk of addiction.

Banning non-therapeutic sale does not undermine the economic or social logics which drive these products. Illegal vapes are easily accessible from in-person and online retailers, and the prohibition also reduces incentives for vendors to use proper age verification.

The prohibition is also fuelling petrol bombings, shootings and extortion in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. This is not the return of 1990s-style gangland feuds. Our regulations introduce perverse market incentives and a black market. As noted in recent public reporting and confirmed by internal police briefings, criminal syndicates are fighting for monopoly control of distribution routes, retail outlets and import pipelines. Tobacco is the new ice (methamphetamines): low-risk, high-reward and increasingly violent.

The Australian government response centres on restricting sales to participating pharmacies (and only for such purposes as managing nicotine dependence), limited importation and ramped up seizures from Border Force and state police. But this is now part of a large transnational criminal economy. Once criminal actors solidify vape supply chains and market dominance, we could face increased and cheaper illicit supply. Our near-ban is just a fence and it’s a matter of time until criminal actors figure out how to jump or cut through it.

Policing is not, and never will be, a silver bullet for complex public health crises and banning non-therapeutic sale does not eliminate the market for drug use. We know this from methamphetamines and cocaine: despite longstanding criminality, their usage rates remain relatively stable.

Australia's law enforcement agencies are already stretched thin, responding to a deluge of cybercrime, domestic violence, youth gang activity and transnational organised crime. Adding the task of disrupting the vape black-market to their list of priorities without additional resources or strategic frameworks is not only ineffective; it’s counterproductive. Raids and seizures may make for good headlines, but they don’t dismantle the economic logic driving this market or persuade Australians using these products to stop.

It is time for a strategic policy reset.

First, we need to shift from punitive enforcement to intelligent harm reduction. We need a legal market that’s regulated tightly—but not as tightly as today—with quality controls, licensing, age restrictions and taxation. This would better undercut criminal enterprises and reduce youth uptake than a near blanket ban that’s easily circumvented.

Second, we must build a permanent, national illicit tobacco and vape intelligence capability that goes beyond the current remit of the Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Taskforce. While the taskforce and its commissioner have taken important steps in coordinating enforcement, the response remains time-limited, fragmented and overly reliant on traditional law enforcement approaches.

There should be a standing coordination entity, modelled on successful national security frameworks, that brings together health regulators, police, border agencies, state governments and public health experts to generate real-time intelligence, assess systemic risks and disrupt evolving supply chains. This capability must integrate public-private partnerships with legitimate retailers, logistics providers and community organisations and be agile enough to address both supply- and demand-side risks across the full spectrum of nicotine harm.

Third, our messaging must evolve. The binary notion that vapes are bad and smoking is worse is neither accurate nor, among target demographics, persuasive. Young Australians and marginalised communities are now at the centre of nicotine use and we need targeted campaigns that draw on real experience, credible information, access to cessation support and community-based outreach programs. Winning this information campaign means more Australians in relevant demographics understanding and discussing their harms, and we should engage popular online Australian influencers as well as local community leaders to create national and local discussions.

Policymakers must also abandon the fantasy of a nicotine-free Australia achieved through near-prohibition. As with alcohol and cannabis, effective harm minimisation lies in pragmatism. If we acknowledge nicotine use will remain a feature of our society, we can focus on reducing harms rather than driving it into dark markets.

Australia’s war on smoking was one of its greatest public health triumphs: but it fell well short of a warlike campaign. We did not criminalise cigarettes. We broke their ubiquitous branding, we informed the public and we reduced their accessibility.

Arrests and fines don’t solve health crises. We can’t legislate our way back to 2005, when hardly anyone had heard of vapes. If we are serious about reducing harms, we need smart regulation, national coordination and ethical, evidence-based policy.